You may have heard of Ushahidi, or in case you have not, Ushahidi is a crowd sourcing application that enables you to collect reports from various people and consolidate it in reports as you would like to. For example, Ushahidi was used to map out crisis areas and other related information during the Haiti earthquake. Most recently, Ushahidi powered uchaguzi.co.ke which collected reports on happenings and irregularities during the Kenyan referendum. Ushahidi collects reports via twitter posts with customised hashtags, direct emails and SMS.
Ushahidi, which is powered by a Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL server requires some level of technical expertise to set up. Furthermore, for those with this expertise, there is also need for a server to set up the whole system and a domain through which the Ushahidi installation will be accessible. This presents a challenge to developers who may have the skills but not the financial capabilities.
So how does the Ushahidi team, consisting of Linda Kamau as the lead developer, directors & co-founders David Kobia and Erik Hersman and a team of 10 others solve this? According to Hersman, cloud computing offers a perfect solution. From this, we now have a cloud platform implementation of Ushahidi known as Crowdmap, currently in its beta form.